The Thing, Flunkyball, and the Sun Dog

 Getting the right mix of folks to winter-over the pole can be tricky thing.  There are lots of tales about people who didn’t quite make it through in the best of mental health.  Everyone usually starts out on good behavior, but even before the sun goes down small fissures start to appear, and you never know what six months of darkness will bring.  The most public example I can think of is the documentary “No Horizon Anymore,” which was shot over the 2009 winter here at the South Pole.  I’m sure there’s some editing taking place for dramatic effect, but during interviews you can literally see people deteriorate in their mood and affect over the course of time.  It’s actually kind of scary, and you watch with a sense of foreboding and concern that that person in the movie could be you.  

(I’m our family expert on short-term good behavior.  I got engaged to my exes after dating each for only six months.  This is part of the reason my father has a rule that you can only bring someone to a family holiday if you’ve been dating for a year, they’ve at least graduated high school, and they have a job.  The BGFE and I were together for ten years before we got engaged.  After a decade, she’s passed the six-month mark times twenty, so I think I know what I’m getting and I’m unabashedly still in love.  More importantly, she knows what she’s getting as well.  I’m overly optimistic and often untethered from reality, I sing to the dogs, and I’m prone to run off to Antarctica for a year.  Did I mention that before? She’s an exceptionally brave woman.)

The USAP tries to get some sense of how the group will come together with team-building exercises held in Denver throughout the year.  The sessions are valuable, if for nothing more than knowing names and faces to greet when you finally reach the Pole; it’s nice to walk into a set of friends when you arrive rather than have to try to break into well-established social groups.  But these are still artificial settings, where everyone is going to be on their best behavior.   It’s like reality television, which is not reality at all.  Survivors stranded on an island don’t play games.

The real team-building happens once you’re onsite. It becomes obvious in very short order who’s going to thrive and who’s going to get along.  Who helps with community projects like moving furniture and storing supplies?  Who complains the most about doing the “House Mouse” cleaning?  (I say “the most” because some whining is expected.)  Who seems to get edgy about little things like which lights are turned on in the galley?  Who hangs up telephones in reverse just because they can?

Because we all do different things during the day, the real team-building happens at night.  Starting in summer and continuing more intently in winter, small groups form around different activities, self-organized and advertised with posters in the stairwells.  As I write this, there’s Cage Match Mondays (a Nicolas Cage film fest) and Noche de Espanol (Spanish practice and conversation) to start the week, pickleball in the gym and Japanese anime films on Tuesdays, and Soccer, Disney Movies, and Finding Faith on Wednesdays.  Thursday feature Python Polar Programming, circuit training, and (computer) Gaming Knights; Friday is volleyball and showings of the drama “Fargo.”   Sunday has guided workouts in the mornings, Dungeons and Dragons in the afternoon, and evening sing-alongs with movie musicals at night.  The events change over the season; I’d like to host a weekly classic black and white comedy cinema movie night (Older than your parents!  Older than ME!) or maybe even show Woody Allen Films Before He Got Extremely Creepy as we get deeper into the season.   

(True confession:  I’m in the Dungeons and Dragons group.  Our party consists of surprisingly quick and militant turtle of a monk, a thief, a novice sorcerer running from his parents, a female paladin who wants to do good by bashing in heads, and two brother warriors, one of whom is half-orc and trying to woo the paladin with mutton because that’s what all the nice girls want.  I’m a cleric with the qualities of a charlatan or, as our Dungeon Master puts it, a televangelist in a world without the  "tele."  Speaking in a voice like Foghorn Leghorn…“Now see here, son, I say…are you listening?”…I fleece people out in an effort to provide them with spiritual enlightenment.  I’m in an uneasy alliance with the turtle, who is a true believer in the cult of St. Cuthbert; sometimes in heat of the moment he’s been called a “reptilian scalliwag with a three-chambered heart” and I’ve been labeled a “four-chambered warm-blooded fiend.” This could get interesting.)

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Our first larger team-building event was a triple feature showing of
“The Thing.”  This is a South Pole tradition for the first off-duty night following station close.  The gymnasium is converted into a theater by a community project.   IT sets up the projector and sound system; basketball hoops are taken up, a large sheet is hung against the south wall to serve as a screen, and chairs and couches from through the first floor of the station are corralled and arranged to create theater-style seating.  While some of the older hands may skip the films…because they turn out the same no matter what year you watch…it’s a rite of passage for newbies like me.

The “triple feature” is not three showings of the same film, but three versions of the story that span half a century.  The original 1951 black-and white entry, “The Thing from Another World,” takes place in Alaska.  A mysterious object is found in the ice, and an Air Force crew that includes an itinerant newspaper reporter who just happens to be hanging out at the Officer’s Club dash off to investigate.  The object turns out to be a spaceship which is inadvertently destroyed with thermite (you remember thermite, right?), but nearby an alien is found enclosed in a block of ice.  Accidentally freed by an errant electric blanket, the alien proceeds to terrorize the base until it’s lured into an electrical trap burnt to cinders.  We killed it.  Hooray for America!  There’s an old flame rekindled, a slight bondage scene, a somewhat mad scientist, sled dogs in a DC-3, and Beaver Cleaver’s Dad as an electrical engineer.  And there’s this great speech at the end:

"Tell the world. Tell this to everybody, wherever they are. Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!"

(In my own version of the Six Degrees game, I would note that the monster is played by James Arness, who was later Matt Dillion in Gunsmoke.  Arness is the brother of Peter Graves, who starred in Mission: Impossible with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, who were the lead actors in Space: 1999, which is what I watch on the TV in the exercise room when I’m walking on the treadmill.)

The 1982 John Carpenter version, known simply as “The Thing,” takes place in Antarctica.  Our hero is Kurt Russell as MacReady, and hard-drinking helicopter pilot finds himself investigating an abandoned nearby station after a Norwegian helicopter chases a dog into the American compound.  It turns out that the dog is that first devours and then replicates it’s victims, meaning once the creature is loose, no one knows who’s human and who’s been assimilated.  Flamethrowers  seem to be an effective way to tell the difference.  There’s some pretty good pre-CGI special effects, and I may never do CPR again after the doctor in the film attempts to do so and as his arms ripped off venus-flytrap style by his replicant patient.  The whole thing is very dark, and it ends ambiguously as the two remaining human characters either freeze to death or one is not human and The Thing eats the other.  We never find out.  It received well-deserved horrible reviews at the time of release but has subsequently become a “cult classic,” though for which cult I’m unsure.    

The third version is a 2011 prequel to the second film.  Also set in Antarctica a week or so before the 1982 film, in his version a Norwegian outpost discovers an alien spaceship embedded in the ice, with an extraterrestrial frozen nearly.  The mad scientist drills a hole in the ice for a tissue sample, releasing the creature who devours and replicates the others on station.  An American scientist having been conveniently brought on board finds that one way to tell human from replicant is that since the alien can’t reproduce inorganic materials, everyone has to open their mouth and those without dental fillings are suspect.  (Best line in the whole trilogy:  “So I’m going to die because I brush and floss?”)  Many people die via flamethrower, the alien spaceship takes a fatal grenade, and we think only the American survives until the post-credits scene where a dog gets loose from the Norwegian camp and heads across the icy plain followed by a helicopter.   Fortunately, I have dental fillings in place, so the BGFE can readily tell if I’ve been assimilated upon my return.

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If watching The Thing times three was an exercise in in group attendance, the following week saw a watershed in group participation.  Our chef is from East Texas, where the Cajun influence percolates out of Louisiana into cities like Beaumont and Port Arthur.  So on the Friday of our first February two-day weekend (the work week is usually Monday through Saturday, 7:30-5:30, with one two-day weekend each month) it was Mardi Gras.  Jambalaya, red beans and rice, and pistolette smothered in a Cajun shrimp and cheese sauce comprised the menu, with King Cake for dessert.  (Unfortunately, we did not have a supply of plastic babies to put in the cake.) 

The beverage of choice was the Hurricane, served from behind the coffee bar at the end of the galley.  Here’s the scoop on the Hurricane, according to the Journal  of All Things True and Valid; and by that I mean Wikipedia:

The creation of the passion fruit–flavored relative of the daiquiri is credited to New Orleans tavern owner Pat O'Brien. The bar allegedly started as a speakeasy called Mr. O'Brien's Club Tipperary and the password was "storm's brewin'".

In the 1940s, he needed to create a new drink to help him get rid of all of the less-popular rum that local distributors forced him to buy before he could get a few cases of more popular liquors such as scotch and other whiskeys. He poured the concoction into hurricane lamp–shaped glasses and gave it away to sailors. The drink caught on, and it has been a mainstay in the French Quarter ever since.

As we had no formal Hurricane mix at the Pole (the order must have been lost along with the requisition for small plastic babies), the drink was improvised using rum, club soda, and various citrus extracts.  Our bartender was our baker, and while the drink was excellent, I was initially hesitant compliment her efforts.  A few weeks ago I had commented to her that I really enjoyed a particular breakfast pastry, but instead of the usual “thank you” I received nothing but a vicious sneer.  It turns out that the danish was not freshly baked, but frozen and merely thawed out, and bakers get irate when you confuse the two.  So from that day on, whenever I want to praise a baked good, I always ask if it’s okay that I say something about the desert.  If given permission to speak, only then may I compliment it.  To do otherwise seems to be treading on thin ice and taking undue chances that somehow Worcestershire Sauce will end up in her homemade Chocolate Moon Pies.  Which were excellent, by the way. 

I should note that I have a personal connection to the Hurricane.  Several decades ago, I went to New Orleans with my “second sister” Jennifer.  We’ve been close since our early teens when my family moved in two door down from hers; each of us refers to each other’s mother as our Second Mom.  She was an engineer in South Carolina for years, and now at three years younger than me she’s retired, travels, spoils her niece and nephews, and watches her investments.  She made good choices.  

So Jennifer and I decided we were going to meet one weekend in New Orleans, and one of our stops was Pat O’Briens.  We did Hurricanes…I think I made it to Hurricane Debra…and then we did something called a Skylab, which as best I recall as about seven parts vodka to one part blue curacao.  (Hey, I was going to be astronaut one upon a time.)  At some point she went to the restroom, and during her sojourn the Hurricanes counted down and the Skylab was ready for blastoff. Or blast out.  In any case, I found myself outdoors sitting on a street-level window ledge at the corner of the building totally disgorging anything and everything my gastrointestinal system had run across in the last ten days.   Jennifer had no idea where I was, and spent upwards of an hour searching for me; I was going nowhere, because every time I thought I was spent there was that piece of corn from last Thursday begging to be seen again.  As best I recall, when she found me I managed to knock down a USA Today newspaper stand with a taxicab door, and at the hotel she put me in hot bathtub for several hours to try to sober me up but most importantly, if I were to barf again, cleanup would be easier. Family cares for family.

(Even now when I’m in New Orleans, I always stop at the same corner and look at the dark stain on the pavement, etched there forever by my stomach acid.  I’m part of history.)

So we’re imbibing the homemade Hurricanes, people are meeting and greeting, good conversation begins to flow, and more spirits are produced almost like passionate rabbits, multiplying across the tables and vanishing into cups, glasses, and gullets. 

About this time, a telescope engineer stops by on a recruiting mission.  He’s decided that we should play a German drinking game called Flunkyball.  He starts to explain the rules, but it seems inordinately complex.  (My generation’s version of a drinking game was “Hi, Bob!” where you watch a rerun of The Bob Newhart Show and pass around the bottle, taking a swig whenever someone greets the titular character.)  I decide to raise an objection.

“You realize you want me to play a drinking game invented by people who started two World Wars.”

The Recruiting Officer doesn’t miss a beat.  “We like to think the whole country was on vacation during that time.”

So dutifully a baker’s dozen of us troop to the gym.  I’ve already decided I’m not playing.  The official, and accurate, reason is that I’m on second call for medical issues.  It’s also true that I’ve never been able to do a shot, let alone chug…most recently I embarrassed myself doing a trying to get down some grappa the night the BGFE and I got engaged.  And at a certain age you just get too old for drinking games unless you’re in your own home, with your own bed to fall into and your own bathroom to clean up the next morning, or a hotel where you can check out quickly the next morning and leave housekeeping an extra-large tip.   

Playing Flunkyball (pronounced floon-kee-ball) requires two teams of four or more players, a dodge ball, a bowling pin, and a large open space.  As best I understand it, here are the rules:

Take the bowling pin and set it in the center of the playing area.  Establish two end lines behind which each team must start it’s turn.  Each player sets an unopened beer on the floor before their feet.  Chose a team to begin.

One player from the starting side throws the dodge ball at the bowling pin. If the pin falls, every member of that team starts to drink.

Once the pin goes down, a player form the other team runs over to the pin and sets it back up, while another player from that same team has to chase down the ball and bring it back to the end line.

When the pin is reset and ball is behind the end line, the “setting and fetching team” yells “STOP” and the first team stops drinking. 

The ball then changes hands and the second team attempts to knock down the pin.

The team that empties their beers first wins.

Repeat.

Watching the game, you notice several interesting trends.  First of all, in the Strategy Department, you want to hit the pin in such a way that the ball caroms off the pin towards the throwing team and not towards the fetchers.  This gives the knocker-overs more time to drink.  Backspin helps, as does the increasingly poor vision of everyone as the rounds progress.  One also observes that each round is longer, as everyone’s aim gets worse.  Aurally, you find that rate and volume of belching is logarithmically proportional to the number and speed of the beers ingested, and seems to favor the winning teams.  And finally, it appears that the best way to demonstrate that you have, in fact, completed your assigned beer is to hold the can inverted over your head to demonstrate there is no beer pouring over you, crush the can against the body part of your choice, and then place the crushed can at your feet in confirmation of a job well done.

It was great fun to watch, and at a certain point I found myself really getting into it.  Someone had loaded Teutonic pop music on the boom box, and I kept looking to see if Mike Myers as Dieter would emerge from the vestibule in a black turtleneck and scream “Would you like to touch my monkey!  TOUCH IT!”  While not playing, I did nonetheless become involved as The Arbiter of All Things Empty or Full when in Round #4, there was a dispute over a player’s veracity in claiming his beer was all gone.  At the request of the claimants I rose from the sidelines, strode over the player, picked up his beer, swished it around, and noted the sound of retained ale as I frowned and shook my head, ruling against the claim. 

After a few rounds, it was decided that maybe the drinking should stop and be metabolized for bit.  The pin was removed, more projectiles were brought out, and the dodge ball began, with some of our number taking the game good-naturedly and others turning it into a no-holds-barred battle for existence.  But the best part was that over the course of the evening, everyone came by, whether to play, to watch, or to kibbitz, but mostly to laugh, even if some of the humor bordered on the politically incorrect.  As the grown-up in the room (and anyone who knows me knows how absurd that sounds) I spent more than a few moments  wringing my hands like Kevin Bacon in the finale of Animal House, crying out,  “There’s a policy! There’s a policy!” to the unhearing crowd.

(Actual alcohol-fueled conversation overheard between scientists:  “What’s your favorite kind of radiation?”  I’ve also heard them argue about whether something is a telescope or not and who has the biggest telescope, not that it’s a euphemism for anything else.  Oh, and one of them mixes their different spirits together in a graduated beaker. But I digress.) 

This is what real team-building looks like.  It was spontaneous, everyone participated in their own way, and bridges were built between unlikely suspects.  It was certainly the topic of conversation the following day (I specifically didn’t say “the following morning because some folks weren’t fully able rise and discourse until the following afternoon, or evening), and the references to our shared experience continued throughout the week that followed.  The new team-building plan is for Flunkyball to be a Friday night staple of every two-day weekend.  I’m going to see if I can find a linesman’s chair from the Wimbledon skua for next time.     

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As I finish this note, I’m reminded that we had another team-building event this evening.  Just as we’re finishing up dinner, we see one of our colleagues out and about at the ceremonial South Pole.  Someone radios her to ask what’s up, and she tells us there’s a sun dog outside.  As one, we rise and move towards the windows to see.

A sun dog happens when sunlight is refracted by ice crystals in the atmosphere.  The ice crystals act as a prism, resulting in two additional patches of light appearing on either side of the sun.  Most sun dogs are somewhat pale and muted, but this one was brilliant, with a rainbow of colors seen on either side perpendicular to our star.

(If you’re keeping score, refraction is when a wave of light changes direction as it passes from one medium to another, like from air to ice; in the atmosphere, it’s the mechanism behind rainbows.  Refraction is why objects in water seem closer than they really are, and why lenses improve vision.  In contrast, reflection is a change in direction of a wavefront such that the wave returns into the medium…air, water, etc…from which it began.) 

I took some quick photos through the polarized windows, which only highlighted the polychromatic spectra at either end of the corona; I grabbed my hat, coat, and boots to race outside, but by the time I stepped foot outside the best view was gone and all that was left was the harsh, blinding glare of the unending polar day.  But the fact that everyone rose as one to experience something unique, and to experience it together, tells me that we all have an appreciation for this place and this moment.  I’m hopeful that this shared sense of wonder will carry us through.